Writing Under Pressure

I recently stumbled across something called Parkinson’s Law. Originally expressed in a humorous essay published in the mid-1950s, this law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” The author, Cyril Northcote Parkinson, based this observation on his experience in the British Civil Service, and he intended this “law” to be interpreted as satire, poking fun at the highly bureaucratic manner in which his government coworkers functioned.

This law became popularized in recent years by Tim Ferriss, a self-described “human guinea pig” who rose to prominence with his best-selling book, The 4-Hour Work Week. In that book, Tim embellished Parkinson’s original language a bit, stating that “Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for completion.”

But Tim wasn’t being satirical. A notorious “life-hacker” who is always looking for ways to do things faster, better, and easier, Tim is a big advocate of minimizing the time he allots to specific tasks. He emphasized Parkinson’s Law in his book, because he feels that when it’s accepted passively, it’s a mindset that works against us, making us far less efficient.

NOTE: Before I go any further, this article is *not* an endorsement of Tim Ferriss and his ongoing “life experiments.” I find him a very intelligent and intriguing person, but I also find some of his opinions and ideas to be… well, I guess “batshit crazy” is an apt term. But he’s definitely a thought-provoking guy, and I think the world is richer for having such an articulate and outspoken presence within the Zeitgeist. And I do think Tim makes some powerful points, some of which I’ll share in this post.

Parkinson’s Law and heavy drinking

I’ve definitely witnessed both the good and the bad sides of Parkinson’s Law. I have an old friend I’ll call Dave, an extremely talented guitarist who built an elaborate recording studio in his home. A very creative guy, Dave would spend countless hours working on original songs, some of which I played drums on. But I noticed he would get so caught up in making small tweaks to the parts he’d recorded, that he hardly ever actually finished a song.

The most extreme example of this was when I saw him after about a five-year hiatus during which our paths had not crossed. After exchanging some enthusiastic greetings, Dave said, “Keith, you gotta hear the latest version of that song you played on the last time you came over to my house. I just added some really cool parts to it, and it’s really coming along nicely!”

In nearly five years, my friend hadn’t yet finished a three-minute song that I’d frankly forgotten about. This was definitely a case of a task expanding to fill the time allotted to it – which in this case was all the time in the world.

On the flip side, in the late ’90s I entered the corporate workforce as a technical writer. After a year of working my way up in our tech writing team, I was given the opportunity to work on a very challenging project: writing the manual for a completely new piece of back office software, using technology that was unfamiliar to most of the engineers in our company. The end result was to be a book more than 100 pages in length, which was due under a very challenging deadline. I immersed myself in the project, studying up on the technology and interviewing key members of the company’s brain trust. I built an outline for the manual, and began drafting the first chapter.

Then the leader of the project announced that the deadline needed to be cut in half. I now only had a few weeks to complete the manual, and there was no negotiating this.

Obviously, I reacted like any trained professional would. I went home and drank heavily.

But then I went to work. I looked at my outline, which split the book into ten chapters. I looked at the calendar, and calculated how much time I could allot to each chapter. And then I wrote the damn book.

I delivered the manual on time, and it went on to be used for years within that company. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. And that was a key revelation for me: good enough really IS good enough, particularly in the corporate world.

The reason I was able to pull this off is that I didn’t treat the task as impossible. Instead, I treated it as a compromise – an imperfect situation in which I could only try my best. The most important part of my approach was dividing the work equally, devoting the same amount of time to each chapter. I wasn’t allowed to devote as much time as I wanted, so I compressed the scope of what I wrote, knowing that if I’d had more time, I could have gone into greater depth. I wasn’t sure this would be considered acceptable, but to me it made more sense than devoting a lot of work to the early chapters, only to have the content taper off in depth and quality as I rushed to finish it. Instead, I delivered a book that was consistent in its quality, and apparently that quality was good enough.

The magic of the imminent deadline

Although I hadn’t yet heard of Parkinson’s Law – or Tim Ferriss – I had instinctively found a truth that has informed my approach to business writing ever since. And that’s the approach Tim Ferriss preaches: to place some limits on the amount of time you devote to a task. Here’s an excerpt from The 4-Hour Work Week, in which Ferriss touts “the magic of the imminent deadline.”

If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. If I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill. If I give you two months, God forbid, it becomes a mental monster. The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.”

I’ve found Tim’s observation to be true more often than not, particularly in the corporate world. And he’s not the only one who believes this – when doing my research for this post, I encountered many others who were eager to share some clever and practical ways they had found to apply (or “hack”) Parkinson’s Law to allow them to use their time more effectively. For example:

In this article on lifehack.org, the author suggests, “Instead of doing the leisurely 20-30 minute morning email check, give yourself five minutes. If you’re up for a challenge, go one better and give yourself two minutes.”

On Joel Runyons’s “Impossible” website, Runyon proposes, “Instead of trying to write 1,000 words in a day, run x miles in a day, or go to the gym, make a rule to do XYZ before 10am. Get it done early and then let yourself coast. You’ll be surprised at how much this frees up the rest of your day.” Runyon also advocates the “pomodoro technique,” which for a writer basically equates to a timed writing sprint.

What’s the rush?

So why am I going on about all this? Probably the most common complaint I hear from aspiring writers is how hard it is to find time to write. And it seems a particularly apropos topic for my November post, because as most of us are aware, this is National Novel Writing Month (or, as it’s known to fans and detractors alike, NANOWRIMO).

I’ve never participated in NANOWRIMO. I find November to be just about the least convenient month imaginable to launch a major writing project; plus, I’ve always been doubtful that I could write something of a decent level of quality within such a short time.

But I’m starting to reevaluate that thinking. As the self-publishing movement has continued to grow, there are more and more examples of very successful authors who are astonishingly prolific, publishing multiple books a year – a far cry from the rate at which traditional publishing operates. And while some of that written output may seem sloppy and lacking in nuance, some of it is damn good writing, and is selling VERY well.

As a result, a whole new wave of how-to’s has emerged, touting techniques for writing more quickly. I’m reading one right now called 5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter, and I have to say some of the author’s advice is definitely resonating. Another good one along those lines is the wonderfully titled Take Off Your Pants, which focuses on outlining books to write them faster.

NOTE: Just as I’m not endorsing Tim Ferriss, I’m not saying we should all try to write extremely fast. But if you struggle with getting your writing done, and always feel like there’s simply not enough time to do the creative work you want to do, you might want to explore some of these concepts.

Do as I say, not as I do

All this advice sounds good (at least to me), but it’s True Confessions time: the real reason I’m writing about this topic is that although I’ve become pretty adept at writing quickly in the corporate world, I haven’t successfully transferred any of those time-management skills to writing novels. I’ve never imposed a deadline on my fiction, instead treating each book I work on as an open-ended project. So in sharing this time-saving advice, I feel like the chain-smoking doctor who keeps nagging you to quit smoking.

As a novelist, I am a painfully slow writer. Both of my published novels each took well over a year to write, and the stark truth is that it’s been several years since I’ve completed a book-length work of fiction. A big reason for this is an ongoing fear of commitment on my part. My rationale has been, “Hey, if I’m going to spend a year or two on a project, I need to really REALLY believe in it.” But this mindset has resulted in a sort of creative paralysis, and I can’t see it changing unless *I* change. At this rate, I’m realizing I’m not that different than my friend Dave, always toying with an idea without ever actually finishing it.

In retrospect, I think perhaps I’ve been imposing some kind of church-and-state separation between my corporate writing and my fiction. I’ve successfully applied time constraints to my business-oriented work, and have had no qualms about using “hacks” to help me get stuff done. But I have not done so with my artistic efforts, perhaps out of a desire to keep those efforts “pure.” Ironically, the first time I heard about Parkinson’s Law was in an artistic context, in an article geared for musicians and professional recording studio engineers, touting the value of doing the final mix of all the recorded tracks of a song very quickly (Dave, are you listening?).

Like Tim Ferriss, I’m always looking for ways to improve how I work – and how I live. So now I’m going to put some serious thought into applying some time constraints to my creative efforts. Wish me luck!

How about you?

Do you impose deadlines or other constraints on your writing? Does Parkinson’s Law resonate with you? Have you explored ways to increase your productivity? Or do you simply let the Muse dictate your workflow? Please chime in, and as always, thanks for reading!

Author of the novels ME AGAIN, published by Five Star/Gale; and TONY PARTLY CLOUDY (published under his pen name Nick Rollins), Keith Cronin is a corporate speechwriter and professional rock drummer who has performed and recorded with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, and Pat Travers. Keith's fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Amarillo Bay, The Scruffy Dog Review, Zinos, and a University of Phoenix management course. A native of South Florida, Keith spends his free time serenading local ducks and squirrels with his ukulele.

Comments

There is a fantastic interview with Jack White on Conan O’Brien’s (online) talk show Serious Jibber Jabber, where Jack discusses how he has to box himself in by imposing limitations on himself b/c if he has free reign of anything, e.g., money, time, etc., it makes him disinterested. So he waits to write the songs until he has studio time booked the next day, and then he has to force himself to get the task done. He and Conan then speak of comfort (in this case, time) and how it kills the artistic impulse. As a musician, you may or may not be interested in Jack, but the discussion of his creativity in this interview is fascinating.

Also, as a graduate student who has no graded coursework except my research papers due at the end of the semester, I was initially resentful that my professor makes us submit various stages of our papers in rough draft form. But then I realized how, when I have to force myself to get something turned in, I do my best writing a day or two before it’s due (my research, however, is ongoing and not rushed). Now, as I near the end of my semester and review the drafts I’ve submitted, I see how having those time constraints to just get something on the page were helpful.

I loved NaNoWriMo for the same reason: it forced me to get through the blank page stage, which proved very successful in stimulating creativity and (obviously) productivity! So perhaps the Tim Ferriss’s of the world may be onto something.

Sorry for the long comment. At least you know you gave me a lot to think about this morning. :)

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Barb. I’ll check out the Jack White thing – the concept doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve seen many artists talk about how imposing constraints or limitations can often prompt creativity.

I’ve been writing a lot of music recently, and have found to my surprise that when my partner gives me a specific (and even seemingly random) writing prompt, I can write something much more quickly than if I’m just sitting around trying to think of something cool to write. Interesting how the mind works!

There are two kinds of people in the world (re deadlines): those who buckle down and git ‘er done (in the immortal words of Larry the Cable Guy), and those who collapse like an empty soda can stepped on by an elephant.

For writing, I’m in group two: like you, I’m a very slow writer. I just published my first book after fifteen years of writing it, and I can’t wait to get done with all the aftermath (POD, etc.) so I can get back to writing Book 2 and Book 3.

But every single time I’ve tried to somehow hurry things, I squash the Muse.

For me, it takes what it takes. I’m not like your friend with the songwriting. PC is 167K words, and there is no padding in it. Everything in it is there for a reason, usually more than one. And I’m physically unable to do more or faster, so I just shrug and keep going. I’m sure most people thought I’d never be finished.

The Tim Ferriss’s of the world give me gas. I’m happy for them – and get away from them as quickly as possible: they suck the air out of rooms. Mayhap it is because I’m an introvert, but more it is that if their method were good and useful in general, we’d all be doing it. After all, most Westerners brush their teeth every day.

Do SOME people need a kick in the seat of the pants? Probably.

But I’m already spending ALL my good time every day writing/publishing, and there isn’t any more where that comes from.

Thanks for commenting, Alicia, and a MAJOR amen to this: “For some things good enough isn’t.”

I do *not* plan to adopt a “good enough” attitude with my fiction – that’s probably something I should have clarified. Sadly, I do think many authors – particularly self-published ones – are adopting that mindset, to the detriment of their books (and their readers).

But where I do find value is in exploring ways to boost my productivity. I really believe these techniques can work – I’ve just not been good about applying them to my fiction. For example, I did participate in a couple of writing sprints, where several of my online writer friends initiated some impromptu “ready, set, GO” sprints to see who could write 500 words the fastest. And the result ended up being a scene in my first published novel.

Why I fell away from doing that, I can’t explain. But I’m tired of the artistic gridlock I’m finding myself mired in, so I’m ready to try some new approaches.

As someone who writes in the slow lane–often with a long line of fellow scribes behind me, honking impatiently–I welcomed your post. I’m impressed by theories that espouse fast writing but like many slow writers I’m a procrastinator and haven’t applied them yet. Most fast writers write from an outline, a process I am now attempting for my second novel. Needless to say, it is slow-going!

5000 words per hour is unimaginable to me, but 500 words per hour is something I might aim for. Thanks for the great post.

Rita, I doubt I’ll ever rack up 5K words in an hour – not without some serious typing lessons. But if I can hack my way into consistently cranking out a few thousand a day, I’ll end up with some more actual *books* – as opposed to a bunch of aborted book ideas. Will it work? We shall see…

Keith–
Thanks very much for this useful reminder about Parkinson’s Law. It has special application to someone like me, someone with lots of discretionary time (I’m retired, living in a long-empty nest with an indulgent spouse). The imposition of “virtual deadlines” makes a lot of sense.
But I would add this. The other shoe needs to drop, by which I mean the revision shoe. Laying on the lash to pump out lots of copy per hour or day only has value (for me) if I understand that, once done, what I’ve written should go in a drawer for a solid amount of time. This is the only way I’ve ever been able to gain the objectivity needed to edit myself.
Thanks again. Everyone in/of Writer Unboxed should read your post today.

Thanks for the helpful and instructive post. I will never be one of those 5,000 or even 2,000 words an hour writers, and I do like to tinker with my sentences until they’re right. But I am slowly learning to let go at a certain point (though I still beat myself up about errors in ARCs, which are not officially “corrected” yet!).

Hi skrizzolo (that’s a fun word to say out loud!) – I’m with you. I doubt I’ll ever attain such crazy speeds, because I’m a fan of not just the story, but the *language*.

I’ll take a risk and make a sweeping generalization here: most of the super-prolific authors I’ve seen tend to use simple, conversational language that does not call attention to itself. I’d be interested in learning whether there are any literary fiction writers out there knocking out half a dozen books a year. Anybody?

I don’t know of any literary fiction writers who write more than one (or maybe two?) books a year. And I often wonder how anyone will ever be able to keep up with reading all the novels being produced as it is, even when one’s favorite authors are writing them.

There is an advantage to writing fast, that is how I wrote my novels. My first one just came out last month, it took 25 days to write it, but 8 years to edit. I’m proud of it and am glad I tried NaNo. Otherwise I would not have any novels at all. I didn’t think I could write one. They say that half the brain writes and the other edits, so it depends on how you set up your system how long it takes.

And done is better than perfect, like your business book. Thanks for sharing this post.

I definitely impose deadlines on myself, such as my monthly critique group’s meeting. My other trick is to make sure I have some other task that I really don’t want to do; then buckling down and writing becomes a way to procrastinate on that task.

With my day job as an engineer, I’ve done my share of technical writing, and it has helped my creative writing in a number of ways. True, it taught me to work to a deadline, but it also forced me to be both clear and precise. Trying to explain an esoteric technical concept for non-technical people taught me how to edit with the reader’s comprehension in mind.

Parkinson’s law definitely resonates with me. I wrote my first (and only so far) novel during NaNoWriMo last year and have been revising it ever since. I make myself deadline after deadline, usually completing a draft in six or eight weeks and then taking a few weeks off. Now I’m on the home stretch, as my goal is to have the manuscript polished by Dec 4 for #pitmad.

However, I’m starting to wonder whether I need to slow down and give myself a few months to really perfect my novel. I know my deadlines have pushed me to keep working, but maybe the final deadline is too soon. I guess I’ll see if I get any manuscript requests once I start querying!

This is my second NaNoWriMo and this year I was determined to apply all I’ve learned. I spent much of October preparing, writing backstory, creating character biographies, and plotting a flexible outline. I was determined to not only reach 50k words, but also finish the novel, which I estimated to be 70-80k. There was one other, last minute, and seemingly unimportant addition to my approach this year: I became a writing buddy with a relatively successful writer (she had lots of writing buddies).

Day 1 I produced 3,900 words and thought I’d broken world records. My famous writing buddy produced 10,000. I felt like a slug. Her average then dropped to less than 7k/day while I worked hard to raise mine over 5k. Yesterday I pushed myself unmercifully and broke 7k. I also passed the 50k win mark (day 9).

Preparation was key, but so too was speed because it shutdown my cranky internal editor who wants to second guess everything. The irony is that my total immersion in the story produced some of the best writing of my life and generated literary insights I inserted on the fly. My sincere thanks to the Warrior Queen of speed and efficiency who helped make it possible.

Keith, I’m a slow fiction writer, though the barbecue of deadlines definitely heats up my business writing. I’m amazed at the fiction collaborators, Johnny Truant and Sean Platt, who publish multiple books (across a few genres) every year. They are declarative advocates of writing faster; you can read about their methods (or listen to them) on their blog or podcasts at https://sterlingandstone.net/

I wrote lots of printed software manuals years ago, and was always bedeviled by the developers, who would make significant changes in how the software worked right up to the point of the manual’s deadline, so that functions for which you the writer thought you had the description nailed then made no sense for the reader (or the writer) at all.

But “good enough” did win the day there, because the software would be shipped with update and errata guides that would cover for those late changes by evil programmers.

Now that I think about it, I’m going up update my entire life with an errata list—all personality flaws expunged!

Great post, Keith–I very much appreciate your honesty about the difference between how quickly you work as a tech writer and as a fiction writer. I’ve certainly found it easier to honor external deadlines for projects I owe to others, versus the self-imposed deadlines on my own drafts, which are sloooow. And while sometimes the slow-down is a result of my needing to think more about a scene or a character–because sometimes you just can’t push rope–I think more often I just let things get bogged down, and the muse goes off to take a nap.

By the time I get to revisions, I find it much easier to break things into manageable chunks to tackle, but I am thinking perhaps I will take another stab at dividing up the drafting work this month. I’m doing Pseudo-NaNo, meaning I’m still drafting the same novel I have been working on all year, but seeing if I can speed up the process to reach the end of the protagonist’s story arc. What if I set up time limits for each “chapter,” as you did with the software manual–at least for this draft?

Parkinson’s Law really resonates here, and I would like to be working on a different story in five years (much as I love this one). Really, I’d prefer to have several more creations by then!

Keith, I write better under pressure, but real deadlines, not the made-up ones. I can’t fool my brain into thinking that a personal goal is a real deadline. And personal growth sort of happens at its own pace. I can’t hurry it up no matter how much I want it to. As I explained to my kids once: deadline means I’ll be dead if I don’t meet it. So I put on a movie for them (reserved esp. for tight deadlines) and got a lot done in those 90 min.

I still have limited time to write and I wonder what’ll happen when the kids are grown and gone. Ah, I’m sure the grandkids will reel me in.

Are very fascinating and timely post for me.Thank you.I have been in a conundrum trying to get a second draft completed. Just the other day I decided to give myself a deadline. I think Ferriss may be on to something here.

I’ve written fiction under deadlines, and I’ve written without. Deadlines get it done, no question. Quality is the issue. Writing without deadlines greatly increases quality, I find, but does it get it done?

Ah.

For me it’s daily discipline that makes the fingers march. I set rough calendar goals too. I don’t stress about them but neither do I let them slide. I make steady progress. Finished is a relative term and I guess what that constitutes for me today is when there’s no more work to do.

Writing with quality takes longer overall but you know, the daily pace is about the same. So whether with deadline or without, I’ll get there. I’m not a wannabe or a dilettante. I don’t avoid, dawdle, sabotage or undermine my process. I don’t angst.

I do write steadily. I do finish. For me, for now, that’s all I need to know. I guess I always have an internal imminent deadline.

Nice post, Keith. Hey, if you figure out how drinking would help writing, let us know. Coffee’s nice but I could use another option.

I will never be able to write 5000 words in an hour, actually my record is 6000 words in a whole day, but it was re-writing, so I guess it doesn’t count. ;) Anyway writing 1667 in a day is a quite normal rate for a writer. What NaNoWriMo (and deadlines in general) teach you is to do it every given day. That’s the magic. You can’t procrastinate because if you do you won’t beat the deadline.
And it works so well that I’m taking the habit to start writing every new novel during a NaNo session (the regular one in November or the Camp ones in April and July). Moreover my very first attempt on NaNoWriMo (in 2012) has become my most successful novel, so it seems it is working well for me. ;)

Timely post. I’m dithering on the next novel because it’s a straight up rock climb and I’m avoiding it. I know pretty much what I need to begin. I’m just daunted by what will be necessary to make it great. And I intend to make it great.

Daily deadlines. I’m in.

BTW: I too am a deadly slow writer, mainly because I write not from the level of words but this inner intuitive space that isn’t really all that verbal. But I know, if I’m connected to it, I’m writing from my best self. I just wish my best self was chattier.

Strange Serendipity Department: I was just on the phone giving what I hope was useful advice to an aspiring writer, who wants to write fiction after several self-published books of business-related non-fiction. He used the Ferris book to describe his own work. Weird, huh? (Cue Twilight Zone theme.)

Hah! David, I can hear that Twilight Zone theme right now – because today, as in 11/11, is the deadline I was given to hand over the final files to the printer. It took me around six months to write this book, but I’ve been editing it for three years, and learning along the way.

I’m a slow writer, and a super-slow editor :)

Reading this today really is weirdly serendipitous – I’m proud to say that at 7.22am today, I made the deadline. Not much sleep has been slept since I was tinformed “it’s the 11th, or forget it,” but that’s what gave me the impetus to edit the second half of the book in three weeks when the first half took me three years.

Love this. I’ve been using the Pomodoro method recently and loving it. I tend to be super-productive anyway, but it’s making me even moreso. And since I do a lot of work-for-hire writing, it only makes sense to do it as efficiently as possible. And I’ve met your friend “Dave” many times over with writers who have written one picture book and tried to tweak it for 3 years. And not written anything else meanwhile. Insanity!

I know all too well the recording studio and Jack White analogies. Having endured the deep punishment of the music industry myself, I’ve seen more artists benefit from tight deadlines than from open-ended “liberation” schedules. I knew a producer/engineer who constantly worked with “oh please, just one more take!” bands who had “oh shit, not enough money to pay for the extra time!” They spent just as much time blaming him for their unfinished failures.
They finally shut up when he did one band’s full LP in 7 hours total. Yes, *seven* TOTAL hours—set up, tracking, overdubs, final mix—because it was the only time and money they had to it. Period. Everyone figured it made a good demo but when the record label heard it they said, “This RIPS! why redo it? Are you crazy?” A few months later the album was in the stores and being reviewed.
A true story I can easily back up. Commitment and performance usually trump perfectionism and excuses.

I’ve noticed that when I am on break from work, I seem to write/edit less than when I’m working (which is why I didn’t particularly freak out when I returned to work earlier than planned after moving.) I do believe having a reduced time allotment for things makes us work better, because we have to DO something, instead of thinking about it to death, and intuition kind of gets set free.